ON CHURCHILL'S INFLUENCES

This essay is for a volume in the prestigious Cambridge Companions series.

The central argument of the essay is to
dispute a common view of her work, which is this: that the central and
most characteristic period of her work was the explicitly political
phase which perhaps lasted from Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) to Serious Money
(1987); that the plays, while formally sophisticated, were nonetheless
clear in their referents: identity politics in Cloud 9, Thatcherism in
Top Girls, the City in Serious Money; that she was drawn to devising and
collaborative processes for political reasons.

I argue that instead her interest in
joining collaborative processes was because of the opportunities for
‘play’ and dreaming. I suggest that actually her writing seems
increasingly strained and her imagination constrained through the 1980s,
leading to her part-break with Max Stafford-Clark and the radically new
direction of her work in the 1990s. I suggest that actually her work
after 1990 and before 1975 have greater affinities and focusing on her
more explicit work misrepresents her theatrical and political
significance.

You may be here because you’ve come across a book, or play, or article of mine and you want to know more. Maybe you’re a student or a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance and you want to find out more about me. Maybe you are gathering ammunition for a vicious ad hominem attack that will expose me for the charlatan that I am.